


Kitchen eclipse

by laughingpineapple



Category: Pyre (Video Game)
Genre: Bonding, Confused math herald dot png, Gen, Late Night Conversations, Storytelling, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-24 15:48:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21820462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: Midnight snacks and bedtime tales and whiskers and a bundle of imps.
Relationships: Tariq | The Lone Minstrel & Vagabond Girl
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Kitchen eclipse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [runicmagitek](https://archiveofourown.org/users/runicmagitek/gifts).



Dinner in the Blackwagon came and went, a loud communal affair as had become the norm for these new Nightwings, too many to fit around the old wooden table by the stove. While good Hedwyn unfailingly cooked for all, the group did not mind when Bertrude sat out a few days to fast, or if Pamitha or Jodariel, having had enough of other people for the day, retired early. The group would be blessed by their company some other time, and if they chose not take their portion with them, they could rest safe knowing it would not go wasted.

So Tariq sat in a corner, partaking of some herbal tea and letting the conversation flow over him, taking in these mortals’ loves, hopes, nitpicks, impetus, fatigue, puns, judiciousness and full disregard thereof, and all was fair.

Eventually, he bade Hedwyn a good night and, alone in the kitchen, sang a little tune to himself as he finished drying the dishes.

The Blackwagon was still and silent, leaving just his humming to converse with the night. Tariq made his way toward the exit, to take a walk under the trees of Graymoor and listen to the forest’s song, but in crossing the corridor he almost stumbled upon a pile of drive-imps huddled together against a wall. Awoken from their precarious slumber, the imps squeaked in surprise; the topmost one lost his grip on his brethren and Tariq knelt down in time to let him hang onto his arm instead. He voiced his apologies in the stridulous language of imps and learned, in turn, that the group really and truly did not mean to get in the Nightwings’ way. Or anybody else’s, the imp added in a sleepy skreech, unsure of Tariq’s standing within the group. It so happened that they had gone to their usual sleepy-pile place but had found it occupied. Moving for a night was not a big problem for them, the imp reassured him, but he did dearly hope it would not be a regular occurrence.

Tariq could only assure him and his – if he would forgive his language – ‘pile’ that the issue would not present itself again and wished them all the sweetest of nights under the stars’ vigilant guidance.

Graymoor’s trees would wait for him, be it an hour or a cycle of the Rites as it had waited for him through the centuries; he climbed the stairs to the drive-imps’ nests, lighting his way with a candle, looking for the intruder.

What he found was Rhae sprawled all over the wooden planks, softly snoring, Ti’zo asleep by her side.

That would be a fair explanation as to why she was not at dinner earlier, he figured, feeling the faintest kinship, the faintest smile.

Rhae was woken by a caress as faint as moonlight, a nice segue to her dream. She followed Tariq downstairs feeling light and luminous, in her dream still. Eventually, reality kicked in and the night’s cold prickled her skin, and her stomach complained about the missed meal.

“Rhae, madam,” she heard Tariq call. A madam! She would act as such, yes, she would. She nodded with the full elegance allowed by her sleepy head, hair bobbing in agreement. He had her attention.

“I apologize deeply for waking you up in this hour of rest, but the imps, too, needed theirs. Would it be agreeable to you if I were to accompany you to your quarters, or dare I suggest grabbing a morsel before that, to quiet the stomach ere morning breaks?”

She pondered her answer. “...Food?”

The kitchen was lovely so deep at night, she said and he agreed to, or he said and she agreed to, as her world had remained faint and hazy until she bit down on a hardtack. She realized then that the warm crow wings she had felt growing out of her back, a remnant of her dream which had somehow crossed over with her as she came down from the imps’ nests, were not wings at all, but rather the feathers that lined the inside of the lone minstrel’s mantle, now propped over her shoulders. Rhae tried to sneak her arms through the sleeve slits, feeling very gray and very solemn, and giggled as entirely too much fabric slid past her tiny shoulders and fell on her lap as a result. For a time, they sat in silence, side by side, Rhae pecking at cold cuts and fermented cheese neither of them could guess the origin of.

“Um, now, I know what could make this moment perfect, I think. If you’d like? A story? A story would be very nice, in this moment, which is already so nice, thank you very much mister Tariq.”

Moonlight shone on them both. Tariq, the Lone Minstrel, who offered his services often, gladly and freely, nodded and took up his lute, exploring a few notes to see what stories they would suggest.

At a chord in major key, when he was settling on a tune if not already a tale, it was Rhae who began to speak, guided by the rhythm of his music.

Once upon a time, Rhae told him, there was a wyrm, but, not any old wyrm, she interrupted herself, waiting for the accompaniment to catch up: a prince among wyrms he was. Having, in truth, bested all his peers, he took to defying the strongest currents of the seas that were his home, and he swam, he swam against them with all his might. But, when one swims against the current, it takes a great feat of strength simply to appear like one remains still, and greater feat, against the current, is to move slowly, and every inch one gains that way is, each time, a hard-earned gain that looks very small, very small indeed. Our wyrm-prince then said, the currents are valiant, and they are great, and worthy they are, and I shall not swim against them. He said, I shall swim with them! His people would know that in this, maybe greatest?, feat of swimming of all the times, they would still know that their prince had been faster than the currents even as their speeds joined. Because his swimming carried his body, but, in fact, like all the folks of the Sea Dominion, his whiskers, his noble mustache, they were left to the whims of the currents. You know, like when you and I go out to swim, the sea moves our hair with the waves, to and fro? He would beat his whiskers in this race and that, he said, that would prove he beat the current. And he did? For a time he did. The joy of speed possessed him! Oh he was so happy, jumping from stream to stream, and faster and faster he swam! It was all he cared for, the speed, not the destination. So Rhae was sad to say that the wyrm, he did not see that he was swimming to the border, and he followed the fastest current of all as he fell to the Downside, whiskers first.

Tariq strummed an emphatic backing of the demise caused by the wyrm-prince’s hubris and was quick to draw his simple maritime tune to a close; setting his lute aside, he waited for Rhae to come back in full from the watery landscapes of her tale.

“A gripping tale, madam,” he told her, and he was sincere. “And one that carries a layered warning. In truth I am led to wonder what the Underking himself would have thought of it.” He faltered, then, because his memories of the Scribes were keen and tender, but private, as if the stories that had not made it to the mortals’ ears were for him and Celeste alone to remember. But the Blackwagon’s kitchen in the middle of the night was nothing if not private, and Rhae’s words had struck a nostalgic chord he ultimately chose to indulge. “For Ores was quick to warn us of the sea’s treacheries, and studied Solis’ currents with the greatest care. He spoke to us at length of all his travels here, wondrous tales that still enchant my imagination, and yet,” Tariq recalled with a sudden frown, “never of the one that brought him to the Downside from his native Dominion.”

He stared at her with moonlit eyes. She smiled.

“Oh, he knows.”


End file.
